About Category

Human memory. Collective, historical, cultural, evolutionary memory. Memory of the environment, space, place. Each and every of them obtains, stores and shares its content in time and space via its own mechanisms and specific ways. In addition, each of them blocks out, forgets or distorts. We provide food for thought in the context of the entire designed extent. What is worth remembering? The debate is triggered by the current topics, which we respond to with various projects on the boundaries of architecture, design, free art and new media.

Universe memory vs. human memory. Universe memory stored in the energy and information fields allows us to perceive syncretically the world as a whole and, at the same time, to distinguish its subtle details. It offers truly objective, real and holistic record of the reality, which goes beyond the human perception of the world. Unlike this, our physical memory, one of a socialised entity, is subjective and extremely relative. It is based on fragmented perception of the world, subjective experience of the reality and is conditioned by various factors affecting the plausibility, content and value validity of the remembered.

Human memory or consumer’s memory? The reality of today’s society often supresses the humanity in us. It cultivates a human as a consumer, being focused primarily on their consumer activities and behaviour, at the expense of Homo sapiens. Communication among people is dominated by communicating things, physical comfort and social relations and is eventually devastating. The processes of obtaining and utilisation of things replace the authentic human experience by subjective and often illusory reality of material products. In contrast to an overflow of useless goods, single-use products or things depreciated in the course of a single season there is the urgent need for selecting and “remembering” only things having a real, not just relative value. Similarly, a requirement for curing our addiction from things and reducing the absurd production burdening the environment as well as our lives come to the foreground.

Technological memory in the service of humans? Rapid development of digital media and memory tools brings new possibilities of their utilisation beneficial to humans, beneficial to encouraging interpersonal communication and preserving values created by (not only) humans. However, the technological advances pose serious risks to biologically determined human and human society. Therefore, one of the future urgent challenges will be the co-responsibility for achieving a balance between biogenic and technogenic development.

Elena Farkašová

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